Moderator: Philipp Sandner, Professor and Head of Frankfurt School Blockchain Center, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Frankfurt am Main

IOTA has revealed many industrial partnerships already (you can read our articles on these topics), but it was rather quiet during the last months as far as banks and financial institutions were concerned.

Only GermanDeutsche Bank’s praisefor IOTA has been revealed to the public so far:

In conclusion: IOTA has solved the fundamental problems of blockchain, because it is scalable and does not cause any costs. The problem is, that this payment system only works if cryptocurrencies are compatible with each other, because IOTA does not have blocks and chains. (source)

Moreover, IOTA is one of the candidates for the Swedish national bank’s (Riksbank) e-Krona project:

IOTA is excited to explore the potential role of IOTA in their national e-Currency/e-Crown initiative as one of the candidate solutions.https://t.co/yzrRBG8Ung#IOTA

C’mon do your reporting job properly. Dominik is not the only DLT representative in the room and even less during his session. Mrs Blythe Masters (talking during the same session) from Digital Assets Holding is the head of the Hyperledger foundation https://www.hyperledger.org/ now hosted by the linux foundation. The hyperledge foundation intentionally provides a coin-less DLT allowing permissive transactions because many businesses (including banks and financial institutions) don’t want a permissiveless digital coin/DLT at all to store their data. It is also interesting to note that pretty much all the banking companies represented during the conference are all members of the hyperledger foundation and I guess all know very well Mrs Blythe Masters. So now knowing this, it is hard for me to guess whether during the conference Mrs Blythe Masters represents a competitor to enter the financial business, or a potential entry point to the hyperledger initiative. Let’s hope for the latter. Now my question is why would the financial/banking sector need a permissionless DLT/coin like Iota? Feeless and infinitely scalable, doesn’t seem to be the answer for the banking sector, as per the explanation provided by the Digital Assets holding. I don’t know the answer myself as I don’t know the financial/banking sector. Maybe this has to do with Qubits to link IoTa with external real time finantial data, but hey, I’m a big ignorant on the topic. In any case, it would not be that easy for Dominik to convince these business actors to use only his new permissionless coin/DLT technology (iota). The best we can hope is that he can do like with Fujitsu who is using both protocols (Iota and Hyperledger) for two different use cases (Iota for IoT economy/Qubic/oracle financial applications and Hyperledger for more centralised and controlled DLT for documents).

IOTA and Hyperledger can exist very well next to each other – interoperability is key, as the IOTA Foundation keeps saying. There will be use cases for both protocols, but let us wait how far the banks are willing to dig into this whole crypto space.
I am sure we will soon see results…